My Favourite Sport : Taekwondo

Talking on sport, I wasn’t active in that field. During the primary school, I was involved in football and my position was either the goalkeeper or the defender. The greatest achievement ever was winning a silver/ bronze medal in 4 x 100 m. 

I chose Taekwondo as my favourtie sport. How about you?

Moving to secondary school, it is virtually hard to join any sports because there were a lot of elite sport player in my school. My school, Setapak High was famous for athletics and hockey. These were the prohibited clubs because you will be ‘tortured’ if you are beginners and plus ‘different skin colour’. Well, you get what I meant of which usually occurred in national schools.

Talking about myself, I joined Taekwondo Club since form 1 if not mistaken. I remembered my instructor name was something sound like ‘sam sung’ but was unsure the exact spelling. The name of the taekwondo association was Global Taekwondo Federation or GTF.

The good thing about joining Taekwondo is a healthier you and your body. We had a training session every Saturday from about 9 am to 11 am. Usually, the training started with a traditional bow top the instructor. Then, it was followed by a warm up session. Initially, we had to run through pillars to pillars of the school building. After that, senior members will move in front and guide the rests on simple warming up technique such a rotating your heads, hips, hands, leg and everything. The seniority is based on colour of your belts. For GTF, there are 6 colour of belts namely white, yellow, green, blue, red and black (in increasing order of level).

After warming up, members were taught on the basic techniques in Taekwondo such as standing and sitting position, punching, side kick, back kick and others. It is good to know such techniques such as to punch correctly to minimize injury to yourself. 

One of the most difficult stunt is jumping kick. If you do not aim well, you might be attacked once you landed down. It needs a good balance of your body as well as the power of projection.

Moving on was the learning on the grading pattern. As one move from the lowest belt which is white to another level, there is a grading pattern that one must be mastered and tested before you can advance further up. Grading means examination whereas pattern means a series of movements combining all important steps of Taekwondo.

And finally, the class usually ended with a sparring session. Sparring means like fighting between two opponents. During this session, you can do ‘free style’ or whatever techniques you wish to or invented by yourself so long as you did not do anything targeting to the face or the private parts as they are ‘FRAGILE’. I personally love this session though a bit scare because you will never know injury awaiting you. Even a simple sparring can possess risk of injury because accidents occur anytime and anywhere. Most of the time, when it comes near to exam, I will avoid myself involved in sparring because if my hands are injured, who are going to write for my exams? Haha. I personally do experienced slight injuries be it bruises on my hands, legs or even bleeding on the gum of my teeth. 

Though it looks like a simple front kick, you must be well trained before you able to raise up your legs and project towards the face of your opponents. If you able to do so, you will get 3 scores.

Due to some circumstances, the Taekwondo association in my school has changed to MITF which stand for Malaysia Taekwondo International Federation. If not mistaken we were being told that GTF no longer exist in our country. Then, after a short period of time, the club changed again to the WTF which stand for World Taekwondo Federation. This time we were being told that MITF only will be practised by the army forces and not the general public. It was indeed a nice experience with my Taekwondo Club.

The umpire in a competition wears a fully yellow coloured attire.

That’s all for now. If you want to stay healthy, consider Taekwondo as a sport. Not only that, it can help to build up muscle and make yourself discipline.

*This is one of the entries filed under Project Alpha Season 2 which is presented by Adidas Action 3 and supported by P1 and MAS.